|
mutata posted:In my opinion, all game artists should be prepared to work on either at this point. If someone wants to be a character artist, for example, he'd better be able to make characters low-poly with hand-painted textures as well as high-res zbrush sculpts and normal bakes if he wants to be widely marketable. Hell, entry level artists even have a good chance of working on Nintendo DS titles at this point.
|
#
¿
Jun 6, 2011 06:07
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 16, 2024 19:02 |
|
|
Superrodan posted:It's sort of frustrating when in response to that attitude, someone above you says "No, don't fix it." I've learned the best way to handle this is to take some time to fix these bugs that really annoy you well in advance of any deadlines. I often take every other Friday on a project to fix a bunch of C level bugs, and pet peeve bugs of other people on the team. It also really helps team morale, that bug that has been annoying them for a week or two getting fixed often results in them working harder and doing more kick rear end work.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 13, 2011 08:32
|
|
|
It looks like West Side meetup for Seattle is happening tomorrow, at the Garage, and Openfeint is paying for an open bar. I'm sure I'll see a few of you there.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 19, 2011 07:38
|
|
|
On the subject of source control, anyone have some good articles on GIT, SVN, and any other source control with Unity? Unity and Perforce are pretty much mortal enemies.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 24, 2011 04:20
|
|
|
Shalinor posted:Apparently, Unity 3D + Mercurial/Git just "works"... SO LONG AS YOU HAVE UNITY 3D PRO. A local independent studio does Unity 3D + Mercurial, and has it working even with a veritable fleet (10+) of art interns. He (the CEO) has Unity Pro, and is the only one that changes scene settings, while everyone else is using Unity Basic (which can convert Unity Pro workspaces fine, but only for reading). They update, use Unity Basic to test out their changes, and submit the code / resources back to the lead guy for integration into the build. Wow, very nice. We will have Unity Pro for everybody because it does something necessary for pretty much every discipline. Do you have any documents or writeups on this? The Perforce situation is the biggest hindrance for us with Unity, and I've been pushing for us to try out other source controls. If I have resources that describe how well GIT works with Unity, it will help us solve what should be our only hurdle with Unity.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 24, 2011 05:43
|
|
|
Shalinor posted:I don't know of any writeups, but by just works I mean "just works." Yeah, I've been convinced for a while that GIT would work great with Unity, the problem is convincing the powers that be that it might work better to switch source control than to wait until Unity gets the theoretical Perforce upgrades. I have been very impressed with Unity, and so far every concern I've had with seems to be resolved pretty quickly by just changing your workflow and expectations.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 24, 2011 06:32
|
|
|
What time of day is the IRC channel generally populated? I pop in every once in a while and I'll see maybe one other person in there. Have you guys decided on a place and a time for a developer PAX meetup? Know of any that are going on?
|
|
#
¿
Aug 2, 2011 06:53
|
|
|
Chasiubao posted:We have an IRC channel? Yeah, #gamedevgoons on SynIRC (check the OP, there's lots of great info there).
|
|
#
¿
Aug 2, 2011 07:20
|
|
|
It's kind of crazy how much the game industry has changed in the past few years. This happened to us, and it's weird how little things will change at the same time they will change a large deal. http://www.insidemobileapps.com/2011/08/02/glu-mobile-acquires-blammo-griptonite/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter
|
|
#
¿
Aug 4, 2011 05:40
|
|
|
When we had our Perforce server upgraded to support shelving a year or two ago, that was the most amazing boost to development we have had in years. Far less "safety" check-ins, end of day check-ins to avoid "losing work", and so many other things are better now. Shelving quick tests and changes over to people, shelving over example code, shelving over assets required to test and implement a new feature. What I'm getting at is shelves should keep problems like what you guys are talking about from happening.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 21, 2011 06:35
|
|
|
Anyone who hasn't been to a PAX yet should really go to one next year. Being around so many people who are so into games helps remind me why we make games, and who we make them for. Spending so much time only really talking to other game developers, you lose site of that passion of people who play and enjoy the things you make. What I do every year for PAX, even if I don't get tickets, is I sit down next to groups of people in bars near the convention center and ask them what their favorite game at the show was, where they came from, and why they came to PAX. Almost everyone I talk to has an interesting story, and everyone is in such a good mood and so happy to be there.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 29, 2011 03:21
|
|
|
Stormin Mormon posted:edit: #gamedevgoons is vacant right now, Labor Day causing it or is the channel just not populated as much? People don't idle in it too often right now. I'll try and open up IRC more often to catch anyone else around.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 6, 2011 06:31
|
|
|
Yeah there can be people who express their hatred of your game super harshly, but there will always be someone who liked it, and reading some forum posts praising something you've worked on never gets old.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 13, 2011 07:40
|
|
|
Wasn't Call of Juarez developed in Poland? So many products can easily end up offending people a language and continent away from the original developers.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 19, 2011 23:05
|
|
|
devilmouse posted:Inadvertent word choice anecdotes! I'm always amused how often Urban Dictionary is used in game development to make sure a lot of our phrases and things are clean. We've renamed alien species after finding the names already on Urban Dictionary as slang for genitals in some country or another.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 21, 2011 18:29
|
|
|
Anyone have some good articles on data/usage tracking for tools? We're exploring implementing this into our tools pipeline, specifically Maya. I know there has to be a bunch of great articles out there on the subject, I just don't know where to look.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 24, 2011 19:40
|
|
|
I think the reason you don't see a lot of posts from people actually working is there isn't a whole lot to talk about, much of the time. We've also got such variety in what people do in this thread, and everyone has such specialized roles, it's hard to find interesting, common topics for people. The people looking for jobs have a common thing everyone can relate to, and the job search is their largest focus. To provide some contribution, we've recently switched from rolling our own tech for 3DS / other platforms to all Unity on iOS. Unity is such a strange engine, for each thing it does that is amazing, modern, and provides a strong workflow, there is often something completely missing that I thought was totally standard for game development. Unity really does not play nice with source control, especially Perforce. For the iOS switchover, we had done a few iOS games before in our old tech, so it's not entirely new there. Also, I love working on handheld, and iOS is the leading handheld platform. Going all digital, with living games is an odd adjustment, I'm used to once it's out the door, it's done. I miss physical buttons, but it's not the end of the world, especially after working for 3 years on platforms with only one analog stick (PSP then 3DS).
|
|
#
¿
Oct 27, 2011 16:31
|
|
|
Shalinor posted:To also contribute along this line: Every problem we have with Unity we're like "This is crazy, how do people deal with it?" and then we remember that the vast majority of Unity users are super small less than 5 man teams, that don't iterate heavily on assets. Luckily for us Unity is itself heavily moddable with editor scripts and the like, and we're just rolling a giant pile of tools for handling large teams. edit: I also love how silly the idea of "small" and "large" teams are. Our team sizes are the same as they've ever been, but in the past when talking to console devs, our teams felt super tiny. Now compared to many iOS devs, our teams feel massive. Nothing has changed for us, though. Chainclaw fucked around with this message at 17:23 on Oct 27, 2011 |
|
#
¿
Oct 27, 2011 17:20
|
|
|
Hot Coffee is a strong reason unscheduled / unplanned Easter eggs will rarely show up in games anymore. It might not seem directly related, but it was of those industry moments that really got publishers to have their QA and production keep a much closer eye out for unscheduled additions to a game. Unscheduled / unplanned Easter eggs are generally bad for development, anyways. Every junior coder will get that idea at some point of "If I work late 4 hours tonight I can get this sweet Easter egg / feature in!" thinking they are only burning their time. No matter how small of an Easter egg you think it is, it will eat some some of the already over scheduled QA time, if it uses any placeholder art an artist might be pulled in to replace it with real art, producers will lose time to meetings discussing whether it's best to cut the Easter egg or schedule more time into it. If it's a good enough Easter egg idea, present it in some schedule discussion early on and get it made official. Cheat codes are especially on the outs due to the huge amount of QA and development work involved in making sure each cheat code is "safe" on a real console. Once you start scheduling time for safe for release cheat codes, when it comes time to start making feature cuts to get the schedule with a more lined up release time, it's far easier to say "We'll cut the cheat codes" than cutting some boss fights or levels.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 29, 2011 20:35
|
|
|
GeauxSteve posted:Cheat codes suck to test. For every cheat code there is, you have to test it in every single mode and with every other cheat code combination to make sure things aren't broken. Its a huge pain. A Bug: If you use Cheat X with Cheat Y and your controller is low on batteries the game crashes 10% of the time. ... ... C Bug: Game isn't fun yet.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 29, 2011 21:40
|
|
|
djkillingspree posted:ugh, I know, right. The worst part is QA leads who will fight to the death for the first bug and let the other one slide >< The whole traditional QA process for game development never made much sense to me. This is why I'm glad a few years ago our studio started assigning QA leads to project from nearly the beginning, and would have them help out over the entire course of the project. Keeping A bugs squashed all of development means less A bugs overall because you aren't building a broken system on top of another broken system. It also means the schedule stays sane, because you're not "hiding" the back cost of a lot of features after alpha for bug fixing, and you're schedule becomes more realistic as you work with the testers to polish up each feature as it comes online, and you finish the task when it's had a few passes at bug fixing, instead of whenever you tell your programming lead "I'm done." It also gives so much extra time after alpha for polish, gameplay tweaks, usability passes, and lots of C bugs.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 30, 2011 01:40
|
|
|
Sigma-X posted:Could someone with more information on QA explain in greater detail what the "traditional QA process for game development" is? It's not that people often develop entirely without QA for the majority of a project, it's more about when the majority of QA staff rolls on to a project. Traditionally QA will hit heavy later in a project. This is especially true when QA is handled at an external location, whether it's due to outsourcing, publisher-side QA, or QA owned by the developer located off-site. On-site QA is a luxury many studios can't afford, so working with external QA to come online for a few weeks each milestone can be really difficult to schedule, especially when the external QA is working with other studios. My favorite application of QA for game development is a small handful of well-trained testers that are on-site, working for the majority of the project, seated as close to the developers in the building as possible.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 31, 2011 06:57
|
|
|
dunkman posted:Just out of curiosity here, has anyone (as a gamer) ever used MetaCritic to actually make a decision to buy a game or not? I did last week when I saw there was a Game of Thrones game and was curious why I saw no discussion anywhere about it: http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/a-game-of-thrones-genesis I also made a post asking about it in the Steam thread, which farther cemented my decision to skip that game.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 31, 2011 20:15
|
|
|
Perforce is fantastic for artists compared to other source control I've fiddled with. Also, the tools Perforce comes with are awesome. Time lapse view for source control is really useful.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 2, 2011 19:08
|
|
|
I had one of those "click" moments recently. There was a certain style of game that I absolutely hated (barely interactive, no fail building games). Then someone described them as "activities" and not games, and it clicked into place, and now I accept and like this style of software. Also, I feel like I'm rapidly becoming an expert on Unity / iOS. My entire job right now is just to understand what makes both tick.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 5, 2011 07:31
|
|
|
Van Ishikawa posted:I'm currently applying to a game company for a programming position, and have been looking into tools programming. It seems like a specialization I can get really into. However, I still don't have much insight into what it entails in more specific cases, and I haven't had much luck googling for examples of what tools end up being created. Can anyone give me a few examples of the kinds of things tools programmers would commonly develop, or have any other thoughts/suggestions on tools programming in general? I appreciate the help. A lot of tools development thrives on the scale of large studios. If you've got 60 artists in a studio, and in a week you can build a tool that saves them 5 minutes of work a day, it's worth the time because it will start paying off after 8 weeks. Tasks like this include cleaner / easier exporting for Maya, building scripts to quickly setup rigs, validating data and checking for errors earlier in the process, so a warning can pop up in Maya when an artist builds something incorrect, instead of waiting until run-time. Also there is a lot of data massaging before export of assets, after exporting assets, at build time for each platform, and at load time. Sometimes tools programming is integrating third party tools, like Incredibuild into a build process. There are also content creation tools. Maybe your artists want to be able to build collision data for actors in Maya for your in-house physics engine. Some studios will have a dedicated tools guy that only does tools, and some studios engine/tools teams overlap.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 9, 2011 03:01
|
|
|
Shalinor posted:I think I might actually get a part-time pizza delivery job again. There's a hot dog place near where I work that used to have someone dance in a hot dog suit on the sidewalk near a busy intersection. A coworker was really curious what that paid and thought it looked like a good "get paid to exercise" gig, and decided to try for it. He took a weekend gig, and I think he made like $60 a weekend doing like 2 or 3 hours of work a day. He lost some weight, and whenever we would be out drinking or doing something that would be an otherwise guilty expenditure, he would justify it with "It's hot dog money."
|
|
#
¿
Nov 12, 2011 04:43
|
|
|
OneEightHundred posted:I keep imagining that it has to be really awkward working on something like the latest terrorist shooting simulator and all of the reasons you think your product is great are the reasons that your older relatives think it's horrible. Much of my family is very devout Christians and I worked on an Assassin's Creed game. Luckily most of them are old and don't understand video games, so I don't have to explain much to them.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 14, 2011 20:44
|
|
|
End of an era for me here, what will probably be the last retail game I'll ever work on came out this week. Everything's downloadable only in the future. Also it's probably the last game I'll ever work on for a Nintendo platform. It is weird going from an environment of "We have to get this in, if it doesn't get on the cartridge that's it." to "iOS is a living environment, so we can add that level / feature in later." It really gives development a lot more breathing room, which is great.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 17, 2011 05:07
|
|
|
SpaceDrake posted:I don't suppose you can say which game, out of curiosity? Shinobi, which is a fantastic last game for a platform.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 17, 2011 17:56
|
|
|
GetWellGamers posted:I really think the death of cartridges is a terrible thing for the historic record of gaming. I mean, eventually Blizzard's going to cancel WoW, and the PSN will be no more, and on and on. And what happens to those then? How are we going to keep a record, a gaming library of congress, when there's no way to check the books out and read them, so to speak? Having something physically there in your hands is much more important than I think people realize. People are currently hosting a "classic" WoW server: http://www.therebirth.net/ The physical cartridge stuff gets more difficult to properly support as time goes by. The old hardware doesn't last forever, emulation isn't perfect, especially when it comes to the controls. Many modern TVs don't even support hooking up these old consoles easily.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 17, 2011 20:41
|
|
|
Is there a thread floating around on Blender in these forums? I'm trying to learn it for making some stuff for a personal project, but the UI for this was clearly built by insane people. Every time I tried to clean it up and make the madness go away this happens: 
|
|
#
¿
Nov 28, 2011 04:16
|
|
|
Shalinor posted:Well that was easy. Dude already got back to me. For some reason it never clicked to me that those sites pay for articles. I've been working on something in my spare time at work for way too long, I should crack down and finish it.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 3, 2011 23:38
|
|
|
The three biggest things I got out of Full Sail, that directly impact my work are: They had a heavy focus on cross discipline training. I had classes in Maya and Photoshop, and this was actually the reason I was hired where I am originally, I was a gameplay programmer who knew Maya enough to write some tools for it. This continues to benefit me, as a large part of my career has been devoted to pipeline and tools. I went in 2002, and there was a small focus on shaders then. It seeded an interest in them for me, and even though it's not something I've been able to act on until recently (not much to do with shaders on the DS). since starting iOS stuff, I've had a great many opportunities to work with shaders. Shaders are a very appropriate thing to learn in school, in that there is a pretty big learning curve in understanding them, a lot of terms to learn and understand, such as lighting models, but once you know them all you can pound out almost any shader request in half an hour. The accelerated schedule at Full Sail matched me very well. I was in the industry and working at age 20. I figure that's two more years of "real" experience I have instead of time spent in school, two years earlier starting my 401k, two years earlier paying off my student loans. I also had set myself up at the time with a number of backup options if Full Sail didn't work out. I enrolled into a community college to work towards a "regular" Associate's degree shortly after I graduated, with the intent to move onto a bachelor's degree at a local University. I also got a job working at UPS, which paid well for what it was, offered insurance, and had some great programs for helping pay for college. I would say the biggest problem I had with Full Sail was the location. I loved Florida's weather and stuff, but the job prospects are zero there, and most companies do not want to risk relocating someone with so little experience. Digipen, on the other hand, is located on the same road as a few game developers, and internships and jobs are super easy to get because of that. edit: And something I learned at Full Sail that works really well into a hobby of mine: I had a class on music production.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 8, 2011 18:22
|
|
|
GetWellGamers posted:Or at least what state? This is always baffling to me because they had an entire class devoted to that, including practice interviews with the teaching aids, building business cards, how to make contacts, and a bunch of other "get your first job" stuff.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 9, 2011 08:39
|
|
|
It's Friday night and I'm in the almost empty IRC Channel: #gamedevgoons on SynIRc. I'll be pounding away at my personal Unity project for a good chunk of time tonight while I idle in there.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 10, 2011 06:02
|
|
|
Is there a list somewhere of game developer podcasts? Or even better, anyone in here do one? I want to get an idea of what developers and publishers are up to with these, and what sort of topics they cover, as well as how frequently they release. Seems like a fun thing to do, but I'll need a good proposal if I want to run my own.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 14, 2012 06:00
|
|
|
BizarroAzrael posted:I'll ask here since I expect several people in the thread have done this before, how do you deal with a long distance move on shortish notice? I may be starting in Newcastle in less than 2 weeks and I need to arrange accommodation, meaning viewings and the like, but it's far enough that a day trip isn't going to work with the amount of travel. I get some money from work to help with the relocation, I just need to figure the most effective thing to do. Staying in a hotel until I find somewhere might work, but it's not cheap, but I suppose it can't work out worse than rushing into a commitment to a place that turns out not to work in some way. I'm going to try calling some of the letting agencies they recommended and see if there is anything on offer short-term, so I can perhaps move with a car full of my stuff and have some time to pick somewhere more permanent, and rent a van to fetch the rest of my stuff. Or I can just sink a couple of hundred pounds into visiting for a couple of days and viewing all that I can, which might put me in the right place straight away but might not, and could end up being a bit of a mad rush. When I was relocated, I just asked the place hiring me for a recommended apartment complex, did all the paperwork remotely, and moved in when I got out there. You can also look into extended stay hotels, or just crash on someone's couch for a few weeks.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 18, 2012 02:24
|
|
|
Monster w21 Faces posted:I REALLY like Crytek. Is there any way they'll let you work remotely?
|
|
#
¿
Jan 19, 2012 04:56
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 16, 2024 19:02 |
|
|
Seattle's been snowed out this week, but I've still driven in to work a couple days because working on games is so much fun. Also, those of you suffering from girlfriend + game jobs woes, did you talk to your company about working remotely? I know out studio has done that many times, and it usually works out pretty well.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 20, 2012 09:00
|
|